James Kynge

The potential for high returns, the ability to control Earth by controlling space, represents a powerful strategic and military incentive.

Therefore, the development of space warfare capabilities has become a focal point of the arms race.

So I think that puts it pretty clearly.

China sees space quite nakedly as a power game.

And you've already mentioned the satellite with a grappling arm that sort of sidles up to other satellites.

And the US intelligence caught, I suppose, a space-based video of this.

They saw this Chinese satellite with a grappling arm sidling

sidling up to another defunct Chinese satellite and literally picking it up and hurling it into what's called a graveyard orbit.

That all happened more than 36,000 kilometers above the Earth,

The Chinese satellite with the arm is called the Shujian-21.

And it didn't take long for the U.S.

military establishment to wonder, well, if it can do that with a defunct Chinese satellite, then maybe it can do it the same thing to one of our satellites.

And the U.S.

has more than 8,000 satellites in space.

including 80 spy satellites or around 80 spy satellites, some of which are trained on China's territory and are literally monitoring every square meter of China's territory.

And you can imagine that China might not want one of those spy satellites to be doing that.

So in 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US warned that this episode, the one that I've just described,

proves China's ability to operate space-based counter-space weapons.

So in other words, weapons that can degrade US capabilities in space.

And I think, you know, what we're kind of evolving into here is not only a huge commercial market,